4 Fast Ways to Streamline Your Social Media

Aliza Sherman is a web pioneer, author, and international speaker. Sherman is the author of 8 books about the Internet including The Everything Blogging Book, Streetwise Ecommerce, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crowdsourcing and Social Media Engagement for Dummies.

4 Fast Ways to Streamline Your Social Media

4 Fast Ways to Streamline Your Social Media

When time is limited, social media marketing seems like a daunting set of tasks, particularly for small business owners with limited staff on board. What can you do to get the value of marketing through social channels while not spending more time than you can spare on the various steps involved?

While time and attention are two things that are important aspects of social media marketing process, these four tips can help you garner attention while saving you time.

1. Dust Off the Archives

A best practice for social media marketing is producing and publishing fresh content on a regular basis. Sometimes, writing new blog posts or website content isn’t realistic for a small business owner. One way to get around developing new content is to sift through the archives of your older blog posts or articles and look for ways to refresh existing content. Don’t be afraid to go back several years to find evergreen or timely content that you can easily edit to bring it up to date. Editing a few sentences in an otherwise relevant article can be much easier than writing something from scratch.

2. Schedule Core Messages

Every business has several core messages that should be part of their regular communications. Company news and announcements, product reviews and demonstrations, event listings, and calls to action such as “sign up for our emails” or “get in touch for a free assessment” are things that keep your business top of mind and help generate connections.

By scheduling your core messages using social media dashboards like Buffer, Hootsuite or Sprout Social, you can free up the time you spend in social networks to responding to direct messages and conducting additional outreach. Even time sensitive messages can be scheduled across several weeks or several days such as posts leading up to a live webinar, your company is hosting.

A caveat on scheduling posts is to pay attention to current events to make sure your posts are relevant and not inappropriately timed. For example, that post about tips for holiday fashions might not be a good idea if people are talking about a major natural disaster that just occurred and people are looking for emergency survival tips.

3. Curate and Repost (Even Yourself)

Everyone is looking to save time, and if you help them do so by curating content from other trusted resources and sharing it to your social networks, they’ll tend to trust you and follow you because you’re providing a service. By curating other people’s content and reposting or retweeting it, you position yourself as an authority and save time by not having to compose as many posts yourself.

If you’re scheduling posts, you can also schedule reposts or retweets depending on the social media marketing dashboard you’re using. Stockpiling quality content that releases overtime gives you more time to breathe and focus on running your business.

Another quick tip is to retweet or repost your own posts to bring older, but still relevant, content back to the top of your timeline. By curating your own archived posts, you’re also saving some time.

4. Get the App

If you’re only using social media on your laptop or desktop computer, you’re limiting your ability to post and interact on social networks when you have some “down time” like when you’re on hold waiting to speak to a customer service representative but aren’t in front of your computer. Download the smartphone apps for the social networks you use most as well as the apps for the social media dashboard you prefer.

Watch out! Having social networks right at your fingertips can be both useful and time saving as well as traps for time wasting. If you need to, set a timer on your phone for 10 to 15 minutes to remind you to stop scrolling through the social media newsfeeds and get back to business.

As they say, “Time is Money,” so being able to save time can be beneficial to any small business. Streamline your social media marketing so you reap the rewards while getting more time to work on your business.